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Nokia Invested In Mozilla?
Pine UK writes "The Register, is reporting that Nokia has invested in the Mozilla Foundation. This news should come as a shock to Opera, who in recent times have had a very large market share in the area of portable device browsers. Opera has also been the browser choice for Nokia, who ship it with all their Symbian 'smartphones.' Nokia have not yet confirmed nor denied their investment in Mozilla."
Expect to see large parts of the Internet go down as slashdotters everywhere spontaneously combust due to an inability to reconcile two opposing knee-jerk reactions.
Umm.. this chart is in bytes, right? Right?!
I always found Opera fast, and much lighter than Mozilla. But, with the advent of Firefox, I'd have to say theres not much reason to stick with Opera. I just don't see very many advantages (plus, Firefox is open source).
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Also repoted by CNet yesterday
Why invest and not just take the source and fork Mozilla for use on their cellphones? I thought this was perfectly legit in the open-source world.
Unless of course the are donatin to the Mozilla foundation for helping develop such an excellent browswer package.
You don't know the rest of the quote, do you? (This is an IRC conversation, and the rest is a reply to the first part) It reads: "Well, you can still get one from a strange country..."
Still, yours is pretty funny too.
Now, if I could just not try to FP stuff, or at least remember to check post anon...
Whoa, I thought for a minute that Nokia was adding special features to their smartphones. Makes the 'vibrate' ring setting take on a whole new meaning!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Also on many other news sources.
There is also more info about the nice little Minimo project (to produce a Gecko-based browser with a tiny footprint).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
they DON'T ship opera with all their symbian phones.
however, it could have just been easier/cheaper for them to buy opera than to invest in minimo.. though this shouldn't be SHOCKING to Opera, if they thought they would just own the market forever they didn't think very clearly.
Opera is still the best browser for s60 though, it won't be easy getting to the same level quickly.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I don't think it would have been a shock or anything. Anyone who thinks they are immune to competition will quickly perish. Obviously opera is a great product for cell phones, but the mozilla guys have been doing consistent work reducing their memory footprint and increasing speed, and with some more focused work they could be as nearly as good as opera. A cash infusion could help them do just that. And Gecko's rendering is at least as good as Opera's.
Well, sort of. Check out this article at News.com
It comes as no suprise since Nokia's strategy has clearly been one of standardization.
And what better way to standardized than to support an open source project?
www.enterweb.pt
I loved my first Nokia when a phone was a phone. Now that my phone needs to be a PDA/browser etc. (AKA Smartphone) I'm not interested in any of their current products.
It seems I'm not alone.
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Hmmm...I really wonder how Microsoft will respond to the recent movement in the browser market. Of course they are still market leaders on the desktop but have you ever used their stripped down version of IE on a PocketPC? It's just a joke!
I wonder where Microsoft will turn in the near future since all work on IE seems to be on hold up until Longhorn and their smartphones never really took off. If I were in their shoes I would start acting. I always considered Microsoft as a serious competitor but lately they haven't made any real progress and seem to fall behind in a lot of markets. Not that they will be gone anytime soon but I wonder if they really are asleep or if they are up to something big nobody has thought of yet. This silence is suspicious...
That's no worse than not giving money and taking the product, which they could also do. As long as Mozilla is getting a fair deal in return for adding the features Nokia wants, I don't see a problem with it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I've always liked Nokia phones but I wasn't going to get another one because of their stance (and their campaigning) on software patents but if they are investing in Mozilla - I'm really torn.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
Nokia had a TV console some while ago based on Mozilla. There are probably engineers in their group who are familiar with it and know what it is capable of.
Without knowing the size of the investment and circumstances, this could be a non-story. I believe that the Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)3 now, and as such corporations can donate to them for tax relief--that may be all that's happening here, with a sprinkling of business sense that it's important to keep browser alternatives alive.
Even though Nokia is widely known as a mobile phone manufacturer they do have other products as well. Their plans to incorporate Mozilla into their DVB products (the Mediamaster product line) as the web browser component have been public for a couple of years now.
? If you are developing for anybody/everybody to use freely than how can someone using it for free be taking advantage of the orgranization? Considering if they didn't want anybody and everybody to be able to use it they would've licensed it differently.
Nokia may be investing in Mozilla because they can give donations and then get the product with no strings attached. Giving donations and entering into contracts are two very different things and it's a lot easier to have your way with an organization that you donate to than dealing with contracts.
Investing? A donation is not an investment. The only investment out of this, is that it will help the Mozilla Foundation stay alive, which is an investment if you plan on using their product. But this is not an investment in a traditional sense. It gives Nokia no leverage on the foundation or on the product it produces. They would need to create a binding contract to be able to legally force the Mozilla Foundation to have their way.
as you can see heise.de which is very reliable posted this story yesterday.
Nokia wants to use Minimo in their smartphones.
...unless that's new. Opera didn't come with my 3650 phone.
You have to buy Opera for a Symbian OS phone like mine (Series 60) but it is very nice. It's one of the best browsers available that I have seen.
I would have been MUCH happier if there was something loaded in the thing when I got it... which may be the thoughts Nokia is having. If they included a sweet little browser based on Firefox, it would really round out the apps in the phones of this class... actually, I think it was a mistake not to include a decent browser in the thing in the first place.
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Nokia is simply keeping its options open for its phones. They didn't want to back just one browser (Opera) only to possibly see it be run out of business and then Nokia would've been left with no viable option. Strengthening Mozilla helps them not only on the phone platform but it also aggrivates Microsoft in its home industry. Smart move, Nokia. Now work on getting the radiation levels lowered on your products...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Firefox is 4.7 MB (actually with the latest nightlies, there was yet another size decease to 4.4 MB) and Opera is 3.4 MB.
Inspired by this article, I just downloaded Opera for my #2 computer (Debian Sid, w/ 96MB of RAM, somewhat taxed already by other services). The overall experience is quite a bit snappier than with Firefox 0.8. Firefox seems to choke on memory quite a bit more than Opera, even when I have image display enabled on Opera, and disabled on firefox. The playing fields is level in the sense that I'm running Ion3 display manager (which rocks BTW, all resource-starved should check it out ASAP!).
The memory footprints as reported by 'top' don't appear all that different - both have 20MB resident (firefox a bit more), Opera has 22MB shared and Firefox has 29MB (well, that's 8MB difference).
OTOH, on my main machine with abundant ram and other resource, I would never use a non-OSS browser. There it's Firefox all the way.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Try this on for size ;)
Load the extension, turn it on, make the FF window small so it fits the window. Looks like with a few chrome tweaks its ready to rock.
Companies like Nokia, Intel etc have a fairly independent investment (or venture capital) fund that makes investments in a very broad portfolio of companies. They spread their bets so that whichever horse wins, they win. Its called the spray and pray strategy. As a result, they will frequently make competing investments.
The interesting thing is that just because they invest in a company does not mean that the business units interact with those startups.
This does make sense to me:
- no licensing costs (fixed costs like this investment you can make up for in volume, but per product licensing costs are a constant drag on profit)
- no need to wait for a port from the browser maker, you can do it yourself, or have the user community do it for you (very few phones have opera ports currently)
- tied into that, user community assistance in general browser development
- the pda opera is not a full browser, minimo is (by full I mean complete css, dom and js support)
- open source (though from a corporate pov this is a tiny benefit)
- better/easier customization than a proprietary product could hope to deliver
- minimo picks up improvements to the mozilla trunk automatically, opera's ports need actual porting effort for updated features (afaik)
- and in the future: possibility of running xul apps remotely on the phone, making developing/offering/selling new features for old phones a doable proposition
Ofcourse, maybe nokia just wants competition in the pda browser market, and opera's steadily climbing marketshare worries them.
Do you really think Firefox is popular because it's bundled with an OS hardly any end-users use?
Also, Opera is not available for only one Nokia phone. It's available for Symbian Series 60 phones, and there are more than one Nokia phone based on that, as well as phones by other manufacturers.
Your list of "bundles and browsers" is basically seriously flawed, and your entire post falls apart. Firefox does not rely on eComStation to survive, and Opera does not rely only on Nokia.
So 7.51 being one of the last Opera versions unless it gets on eComStation(!) is pure nonsense and wishful thinking on your part. Why would Opera go away when its user base is growing and they are making more and more money?
Your post sounds a lot like a karma whorish post with some vague points that make sense unless you know a lot about this, in which case, it just sounds like nonsense.
Unfortunately, you managed to fool a few moderators...
Clever signature text goes here.
Mozilla is not bloated code - everything in there does something. Bloat refers to useless code.
- Tabbed browsing - you may use tabs either in graphical or even in text mode.
- Lua scripting - ported from Links-Lua, not from current ELinks code, but
the differences are not so sensitive, I hope.
- HTTP Auth - stable, ported from Elinks
- HTTP Proxy Auth - ported from Elinks, need to be checked.
- Blocking of selected images - my own code
;-). You may block images containing given
substring (of course, it is better to use regexps, but this way is
more portable). Just press '-' to edit the list of blocked patterns.
- Cookies saving - ported from ELinks, now our HTTP-header date parsing is
correct, I hope.
- New options system - inspired by ELinks one, but much more uglier
currently
;-)) Only a few options are implemented through it.
Press 'Ctrl+o' to call options manager.
- Possibility to open new windows instead of new links instances in graphics
mode - new socket is created with name 'glinks' in links dir, instead
of 'links' for text instances, so they can work independently. After
that command 'links -g' works like 'mozilla -remote', simply opening
new instances from currently running one. But it has some limitations -
these new windows will open on the same display as original one...
- Url copying - some code from Ludvik Tezar' patch, but the backend is organized
more cleanly - there are two additional fields in struct graphics_driver -
put_to_clipboard and get_from_clipboard. Only X11 backend is functional
now, as I don't use others
;-)
- Full-text selection - Now we have nearly complete full-text selection -
you may select any part of rendered text (except form controls) and copy
it to clipboard. Clipboard charset is configurable through new options
system (Ctrl+'o').
- Simple printing - It is VERY simple - we make
PDF file (throung pdflib) with text only (just a rectangles instead of images), and
with PDF internal fonts only (don't even try to print non-latin-1 texts!!!) - but we have more-or-less correct layout and
page breakings. Press 'P', and it will ask you for filename to print to.
- Forward history - really, single history list, you can move backward
and forward through it
- Extended and configurable 'toolbar' - there are currently Back, History, Forward, Reload,
Bookmarks, Home and Stop buttons.
'Configurability' means that you can change each button look
(they use pixmaps from special internal system-medium-serif-vari font you
can find in graphics/font dir) and even turn it on or off.
- Configurable 'mini-status' - some useful info in lower right corner of
your window to show how many connections now in 'running' or 'connecting'
state are, and also SSL, Content-Encoding and Images flags.
- Some small but useful improvements - support for "small" and "big" tags,
keybinding ("i") to turn on/off images, possibility to show HTTP
header ("|", as in Elinks), support for compressed content (Content-Encoding
and gzipped local files), configurable support for Accept-Charset and Accept-Language.
- Modularized font subsystem - currently builtin fonts and Unicode
TrueType (through freetype backend) may be used. Font manager is available
(Ctrl+'i') for adding/deleting external (only freetype yet) fonts.
External fonts have the same way into the code - so they are antialiased
as good as builtin
;-)
- Dialogs shadows and borders - Just shadows
;-))
From links-hacked site.Can you spell BLOAT ? I know you want to, c'mon, dont be shy, Lets say it togethet, Mozilla is a BLOATHOG !
Go grab those torrents.
Ehm. They're not from the same country. Nokia is from Finland, Opera is from Norway. Now, while both Norway and Finland are part of "Scandinavia", to suggest it's the same country is stretching it a bit far.
-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-